None of us want to hear about a decline in IT spending, but that is tough. This is an economic meltdown, and IT spending seems hell bent on declining this year, despite projection after projection showing spending would stay above that negative territory. We had better get used to the word "decline" for a while.
The analysts …

Hmm

This isn't really a surprise. My lot have basically cut all the "new" projects. All those lovely shiny promised systems that turn out to be massive white elephants once bought, and only manage to replace 1/10th of the "scoped applications" whilst annoying the users.

The reason IT spend is huge most of the time is that the management do not question the vendors enough. We're now seeing attitudes of "we'll make do with what we've got", but as that happens, the teams supporting the most useful systems are seeing increased demands and a lot of managers suddenly realising that their systems are actually capable of doing what <insert big name "solution" here> was going to be sold to them for 100 times the cost.

I welcome that trimming, it's about time people looked carefully at these big projects and understood that throwing money at something is a lot less useful than just asking your users.